More Blog Reviews of Hereville

I’m so far behind on linking to blogs that have reviewed Hereville! But here’s a few more.

Erica Friedman at Okazu reviewed Hereville — which was especially kind of her, because that’s a blog which specializes in manga!

I can’t think of a better book for a young me. 11-year old Mirka would have been a fine companion in my desire for adventure and magic and a chance to use my wit against the odds. If you know a young girl with an open mind, and interest in folk tales and a desire for a sword, Hereville would make a terrific, totally-not-what-they-expected gift.

Stacey, a Brooklyn librarian blogging at Good Books And The Random Movie, writes:

Deutsch has created a graphic novel that explains about Judaism through this beautiful tale of courage and finding ones place in the world. The illustrations are beautiful and the Yiddish words are defined at the bottom of each page. A great read for Jews, fans of graphic novels, fans of strong female protagonists, and anyone who has even wanted to fight dragons.

And the reviewer at the Provo City Library Children’s Book Review writes:

A delightful yarn (you’ll excuse the expression) sprinkled liberally with Yiddish expressions, Jewish folk and religious lore, and memorable, nuanced characters, well-drawn and well-spoken.

Over at Muddy Puddle Musings (interesting name!), Chris writes:

The characters, including a huge talking pig, a witch that lives in a nearby house just discovered, and a knitting troll are wonderful. Fresh, believable, fun, and funny. Adventurous, animated, well-illustrated, clear…a wonderful book!

And Book Aunt (so many book bloggers have really neat blog names!) writes:

Watch for the ways Mirka’s culture is interwoven with the plot. Especially keep an eye out for knitting, not to mention Mirka’s logic, which she apparently learned at her stepmother’s knee. Aside from his obvious creativity, Deutsch’s biggest success is the character of Mirka, who is very real and likable. Now, your average kid may not reach for Hereville, and I do think young readers would benefit from a little intro about Orthodox Judaism before launching into this book, but then they’ll discover a great read.

Thanks to all the bloggers and librarians who have been kind enough to recommend Hereville. I know that Hereville’s kind of a weird book, and if it’s finding an audience it’s only because people (especially librarians!) have been willing to recommend it.

The Jewish Comics Blog interviews Barry

Steven Bergson of the Jewish Comics Blog has published an interview with me. Steven, who has been incredibly supportive of Hereville, really did his research, and asked smart questions that no one else has thought to ask me.

Here’s a sample, but you’ll have to go to Steven’s site to read the whole thing:

SMB: Thus far, the only Jews we’ve encountered in Hereville have been Hasidic Jews like Mirka and her family. Do other Jewish groups exist in the world of Hereville? Will the reader be made aware of other denominations (e.g. Conservative or Reform) or are they considered totally irrelevant in Mirka’s community?

BD: All sorts of Jews exist in the world of Hereville, but they don’t live in the town, and they are pretty irrelevant to Mirka’s community. But there are non-Hasidic Jews who visit town every now and then. For instance, Rochel, Mirka’s stepsister, has a father who comes by a couple of times a year, and he’s Jewish but not Hasidic.

And then, as if that wasn’t enough, he also gathered links to what appears to be every single interview with me available on the web, and published them below the interview! He even found the old interview that Erika Moen conducted with me, before the book version of Hereville was even published.

Thanks, Steven!

Library Mama on Hereville: “Everyone I’ve shown it to has been enchanted”

I love librarians! So I’m happy every time I read a positive review of Hereville on a librarian’s blog (and I haven’t seen any negative ones yet, thankfully).

Library Mama, who is as you might guess a librarian and mother, writes:

The line on the cover of this winning graphic novel sums it up nicely: “Yet another troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl.” Mirka, the 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl, is somewhere towards the bottom middle in age in a large blended family (helpfully for the character count, only those closest in age to Mirka are introduced). She longs to fight dragons and resents her mostly kind if ugly stepmother’s attempts to teach her to knit. It’s sweet family life sprinkled with Yiddish, until Mirka sees a witch in the forest and starts being chased by her talking pig. The art sets just the right tone between serious and funny, and the story is a warm-hearted adventure with a good sense of humor. I fell hard for Mirka, and loved the details of Jewish mythology and Orthodox life. I’ve been toting this one around with me, and everyone I’ve shown it to has been enchanted. I’d say it’s ideal for about third grade up, and I’m really hoping for a sequel where Mirka gets to use her new sword.

Thanks, LM!

Shelf Employed reviews Hereville!

I am very far behind on linking to blogs that have mentioned Hereville! I’ll catch up someday.

Shelf Employed, a cleverly-named blog written by a children’s librarian, discovered Hereville because of the Sydney Taylor Award — but Hereville wasn’t what they expected.

I expected a heavy, perhaps historical fiction, story of the Jewish experience. What I found instead, was a modern, graphic novel, fairytale adventure, offering a prolonged peek into a very insular community – that of the Orthodox Jew. Through Mirka, the book’s lively and determined protagonist, the reader sees a young girl who, despite the tenets of her faith that keep her apart from secular and non-Orthodox society, is much like any other young girl – willful and curious, tempered with love for her family and friends, and a grudging respect for her elders.

I admire writers who can try to do things like the “story of the Jewish experience.” But boy, is that not something I’d ever attempt! I like my stories to have a much smaller scale than that.

Anyway, there’s much more to the review at Shelf Employed, but you need to go over there to read it. 🙂

Brigid Alverson Interviewed In The Comics Reporter

There’s been no greater booster of Hereville than comics journalist Brigid Alverson, who is interviewed here by Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter. Brigid — who has interviewed me more than once, and who I like a lot — was nice enough to mention Hereville:

SPURGEON: Can you talk for a bit about one or two of the comics you thought were great this year? What makes a comic great as opposed to merely good? Is there something that tends to connect great works in comics in your mind?

ALVERSON: A great comic crosses over a boundary in my brain so that I’m not just reading it, I’m experiencing it on some deeper level. Hereville was the best example of that, and I feel like a broken record because I talk about it a lot, but it really was the standout comic for me. It has to do with the way that the creator, Barry Deutsch, creates a world and very quickly draws you into it, so you are getting inside the characters’ heads. There’s a scene in there where the main character, who is 11, is solving a math problem, and as I read it, I was solving it in the same way. Many of the sequences were like that. It’s as if I hallucinated this book rather than just reading it.

Wow! Reading that made my day. Thanks, Brigid. (And click through to read the entire interview — she talks about lots of stuff other than Hereville!)

(Information about buying your own copy of Hereville can be found here.)

Beautiful dance animation

I love this little animation, a collaboration between an animator, a choreographer, and several dancers.

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

There’s also a making-of video.

Barry Intereviewed On “Books We Love”

“Books We Love,” the blog of the Park Ridge Public Library, has posted an interview with me. Here’s a sample:

I love the character of the pig-what made you choose a pig and not some other animal?

In retrospect, it’s silly how long I spent trying to decide on the right animal to be in the Witch’s yard. Wolf? Huge housecat? Giant ferret? But then I thought of pig, and obviously a pig was the perfect antagonist, just because a pig is the iconic “non-kosher” animal that Jews avoid eating. And once I had that, the pig’s grumpy, over-the-top personality fell into place.

Do you have any subjects that you’re dying to write about, but haven’t yet? Any non-Hereville books that you have percolating away in your head?

I have a few non-Hereville ideas. But Hereville is also a very broad canvas — after all, hundreds of people live in the town of Hereville. So I think I could happily do many, many more Hereville books, and be able to fit in a huge range of stories and characters.

I’d be really eager to do a story with a positive, fat character as the protagonist. I was really disappointed when the TV show “Huge” was canceled.

Click through to read the entire interview! And my thanks to Sarah Hagge for doing such a great job conducting the interview. By the way, Sarah also wrote a very nice review of Hereville back in December; you can read that review here.

The First Hereville Fanfic!

Fanfic writer Jade Lennox has great taste — just look at her list of fandoms, which includes Slings and Arrows (my favorite TV show), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (another favorite of mine), Castle Waiting (a wonderful comic book by Linda Medley which I think most Hereville readers would enjoy), Love and Rockets, Wonderfalls, Farscape, Veronica Mars… I have to admit, by “great taste,” I just mean that she (he?) likes a lot of comics and TV that I like.

Anyway, I was thrilled when Jade Lennox recently wrote “Who Needs A Gallows When You Have A Sword?,” a Hereville short story featuring Mirka, Fruma, Zindel, Rochel, Gittel, and a brand-new character, Fruma’s brother Feter Gedalya. It’s well-written and fun to read, and in some ways it parallels thought I’ve had about Hereville characters (I’ve often thought that Mirka would resist the pressure to dress as Queen Esther!).

By the way, if you find the format or font difficult to read, click on the “Hide Creator’s Style” link near the top of the webpage, towards the right, and that should fix things.

Today is World Fair Use Day, which makes it an especially auspicious day to link to some fanfic. My thanks to Jade Lennox, for writing such a terrific story. And to my friend TeaOtter, who requested a Hereville story.

Barry Interviewed on “Hey, Women! Comics!” (And why having good female characters matters.)

The blog “Hey, Women! Comics!” has posted an interview with me.

Here’s a bit from the interview; there’s more at the link.

HWC: What sort of woman do you think Hereville best appeals to?

BD: I’m not sure! I’ve noticed that most of Hereville’s reviewers are female, though, so there must be some appeal there.

I intended Hereville to be a feminist book – not in the sense of being over-the-top or preachy, but int he sense of writing a book with a kick-ass but not perfect female protagonist, and with a lot of female characters who actually matter to the story (especially Mirka’s not-at-all-evil stepmother, Fruma.) I often read books to my two honorary nieces, Sydney and Maddox, and they’re always very aware of if a book has girl characters they can relate to or not; without any prompting from me, they’re always asking “is this one a girl?” and pointing to the female characters and saying “I’m her!” So I think it’s important.

I think any reader who likes fun, character-based fantasy stories could enjoy Hereville.

Hereville interview on The Book of Life!

Heidi Estrin — a librarian who knows more about Jewish kids books than pretty much anyone on Earth — interviewed me for her podcast, “The Book of Life.” It was a really fun interview for me (and only the second interview I’ve done face-to-face, rather than via email or phone), and considering the depth of her knowledge, I’m super-flattered that Heidi has been supporting Hereville.

You can listen to the interview here, on Heidi’s website. It’s about 19 minutes long.